


Sometimes I Take a Fool Notion

by deathmallow



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: AU, F/M, Ficathon, No Mockingjay, Third Quell
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-27
Updated: 2013-04-30
Packaged: 2017-12-06 15:24:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 18,918
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/737192
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deathmallow/pseuds/deathmallow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>No Katniss and Peeta, no Mockingjay, and for Haymitch and Johanna, the Third Quell arrives anyway.</p><p>For the Bread and Circuses LJ ficathon, prompt <i>Haymitch/Johanna, He wants to say I love you/But keeps it to good night/Because love would mean some falling/And she's afraid of heights.</i>  </p><p>Also gacking some inspiration from another "no rebellion, Third Quell goes ahead" prompt from the same prompter.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dorianpavus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dorianpavus/gifts), [Jada_Jasmine](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Jada_Jasmine).



> For finnickodair.
> 
> Warnings for arena-based violence and death, alcoholism and drug abuse, major char death, language, non-explicit sexuality, murder, sexual slavery/non-con situations, and mentions of forced pregnancy.
> 
> Title from the lyrics of Johnny Cash's cover of "Goodnight Irene".
> 
> Thanks to the lovely jeeno2 for beta reading!
> 
> Katniss and Peeta were never reaped in this AU. The tributes for the 74th Games were two Twelve kids who died like every other year before.

Haymitch put down the phone and mutely reached for a new bottle of white liquor, snapping the seal on it. To hell with Plutarch, all those veiled allusions over the years about the rebellion just _waiting_ to happen, waiting for the right moment. 

_You’re a fucking Gamemaker, we both know there’s_ something _you can do…_

_I’m sorry, Haymitch, there’s nothing I can do. Only the president can have the power to change things, and…_ They knew he was speaking both about Snow and about that shadowy figure in Thirteen that Haymitch had never talked to. 

That was when he understood. Plutarch had made contact already, probably as soon as the card was read last night. Those quietly promised allies in Thirteen wouldn’t stir themselves, not for this. 

He was Twelve’s only victor; just like there was no wife at his side, there would be no female victor-tribute either. Alone as ever, and he let out a bitter laugh as he realized that one last time, he’d messed up Snow’s scheme there. 

That didn’t last long, and as usual, his messing things up meant someone else paid. The details followed swiftly. Snow announced smoothly that due to Twelve’s misfortune in having only one victor to offer, in order to give Panem the Games under the terms specified on the card during the Dark Days, with tributes reaped only from existing victors, at the Twelve reaping the names of the female victors from the candidate pools with excess numbers over two tributes and two mentors, namely One, Two, and Four, would be placed in the Twelve reaping bowl. Whoever was drawn, if not already selected during their home reaping and if not replaced by a volunteer when their name was announced, would be seconded as "Twelve" for the Games. His mentor would be taken from one of the two districts that didn't offer up that extra tribute. 

He gave a harsh laugh. He’d won the Second Quell in a double reaping and now he was causing another one elsewhere for the women thanks to Snow. He wondered which of the women it would be and just how much she would resent wearing being forced to wear Twelve’s black on his behalf rather than the gold of One, the deep red of Two, or the blue-green of Four. 

He drank and he drank and he thought about drinking enough to not ever wake up. But he knew if he did that and thwarted the plan someone else would pay, because Snow always made someone pay, and he’d had enough people dead on his account already. A Career victor just added to that tally. 

The knock on his door came on the third day after the reading. “President’s orders,” Cray said, eyeing Haymitch, who still had a bottle with some dregs in it in his hand. “No more alcohol.” 

Jarron Undersee gave him what might have almost been an apologetic look. “And you’re to start training for the Quell once you’re…well again.” Once he’d dried out, Haymitch understood. 

So that was Snow’s little “fuck you” to him to keep him in line—not only did he expect Haymitch to take part in this debacle, he expected him to put his all into it. He smirked at Cray. “Then all the booze,” he encompassed the whole of the house with an expansive sweep of his arm, “is yours, dear Cray. My parting gift to you.” 

Then he looked blearily at the other man with the Peacekeepers. “And who the hell are you?” he asked. 

“Doctor Galen Wing,” the man said, a fairly plain man as Capitolites went. The only alteration Haymitch could detect was that the blond highlights in that dishwater brown hair were probably dyed. The doctor gave no hint of his thoughts about the situation from his expression. “The president,” he explained quickly, “sent me and several of my colleagues from the Capitol to attend closely to those victors with substance abuse problems, so they can start their training.” 

At least he hadn’t sent that asshole Lucius Sixleigh whose only concern had ever been that Haymitch was fit for fucking. “How generous our dear president is,” Haymitch said with a dark smile. “Sending someone to look after my health all the way from the Capitol, so I can be healthy to get killed in the arena.” What an asshole. He thought of Poppy and Max out in Six and realized they’d be going through this hell too, and Laurence out in Five, and others too. He wondered just how short the Capitol was of doctors right now given the number of victors who had their drug of choice. His smile grew wider. “If I’m gonna be stuck in bed, we’d better stay at whatever house they’ve put you in. Mine isn’t fit for company.” He pointedly nudged some dirty laundry with his foot and finishing the bottle of white liquor—one last drink before Cray confiscated it all—he dropped it casually to let it shatter on the floor beside his bare feet. 

“I’ll have someone clean while you’re…” Wing hesitated. “Indisposed,” he finished. 

Haymitch shrugged. It didn’t much matter. The place would sit empty after he died anyway. It had been twenty-four years and forty-eight dead children. With or without him, there would be no more victors in Twelve in a big hurry. Somehow, as ever, the thought was both pain and comfort. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Johanna had thrown just about everything breakable that she had, chopped a winter’s worth of firewood in a frenzy, and it didn’t help. Back into the fucking arena. Like she deserved knowing she was doomed just because she was the only Seven victor who happened to have tits. _Send Blight instead of me,_ she thought with a curl of her lip, _he’s fucking useless._

Cedrus came out to Johanna’s backyard, leaning on his walking stick. She was sure the Capitol could have provided a better prosthesis for that foot in the fifty years since his win, but he had refused. She respected that. He wasn’t going to take anything from them without them forcing it on him. Glancing down the way towards Cedrus’ house, she was sure his husband Matthias was probably freaking out too, even several days later.

“Blight and I spoke already,” Cedrus said, laconic as ever, rubbing his bearded chin idly as he looked at her. “He’s the one going in.”

“Fine,” she said, and that was that. She knew both of them would probably be equally useless to her: Blight with his wandering mind and Cedrus with his age and that gimp foot. It didn’t matter. In the arena, she wouldn’t want to kill either of them, but neither did she have any particular loyalties to them either.

Cedrus nodded in acknowledgment. “He says he’s fine, and to throw my efforts your way. He’d prefer you made it out.”

“And he can’t come tell me that himself?” she said archly, burying the axe in the chopping stump, unbuttoning her shirt over the t-shirt and flapping the tails of it a bit to let in some of the spring breeze. 

“He has things of his own to deal with right now, girl,” Cedrus told her in a tight voice. What the hell a middle-aged man with no wife and family had to deal with, Johanna had no clue. “I’ll get you sponsored best I can. They know who you are.”

“They know who they think I am,” she corrected him sharply. What they had forced her to become, that mold they wouldn’t let her escape. They didn’t know the first fucking thing about her. 

He didn’t argue, which pretty much meant she’d won that argument. “There’s no point trying to change your angle. We play you like a Career this time. Your skill, your ferocity, your determination.”

“There’s going to be six—seven,” she thought of whoever was getting thrown in as Haymitch’s partner, “Careers in there already.” She wasn’t going to pity whoever the woman was. One, Two and Four couldn’t whine given that they at least had chances to not go into the arena, unlike her. Besides, the only Career she cared about not hearing their name on Reaping Day was Finnick.

“Then you’ll have to be outstanding somehow.” With that blunt advice, he gave another of those decisive nods that told her the subject was closed. “Elmar Luoma dropped by this morning.”

“And what did our illustrious mayor want?”

“To pass on instructions from the president: you and Blight are to start training for the Games tomorrow.”

She reached for the axe again. How very like Snow, she thought. He’d make them all kill each other for entertainment and he’d make them be _so good at it_ when they did it.

The axe slammed down with more force than necessary as she imagined it was Snow’s skull she was splitting, and she automatically reached for another piece of wood, and another, and another. When she looked up again, Cedrus was gone.

~~~~~~~~~~

The heightened drama of the women’s reaping came before the foregone conclusion of his condemnation to the arena. The detox had nearly killed him. He’d thought more than once that the three months of training would kill him but he pushed himself beyond it grimly, knowing he wasn’t going to slack off and give Snow any excuse at all to take it out on the district. Now the arena had its chance to kill him; wasn’t like he had incentive to be the last victor standing.

He’d try to protect those with a future if he could, but beyond that…he tried to not think about it. Killing unknown children had been bad enough. Killing his friends was still unthinkable.

Haymitch stood in the roped-off pen all alone, not even glancing at the other empty pen where nobody stood. Effie clawed around inside the women’s bowl, catching a slip of paper. “Cashmere Donovan of District One,” she trilled. After a moment of waiting, Effie touched a hand to her ear where she was wearing an earpiece that apparently communicated with the escorts in One, Two, and Four. “Cashmere has already taken the role of District One’s female tribute. So, well, I suppose I’ll draw again!” She sounded uncertain. Effie and her fucking protocols, and of course, something unprecedented like this was messing with them and knocking her off her game. He almost enjoyed seeing that. “Laeta Pfeffer of District Two!”

Laeta was a recent victor, of the 68th Games. He was a little surprised when Effie, perturbed, got another message and announced, “And Eunike Sherman has taken her place.” 

He understood the message loud and clear—Two might be forced to sacrifice one of its own for another district, but they would show their opinion of Twelve by sending a lesser tribute, one who had failed to live up to district expectations and delight the Capitol the way someone like Enobaria had. Still, it wasn’t like they’d sent their oldest tribute, Aurinia from the 10th Games. He was a little surprised that they’d risk sending her, though, rather than sending Laeta. Eunike hadn’t exactly been celebrated for her win during the 72nd Games, when most people died of thirst and heat stroke and scorpion stings, and she had been quickly forgotten. Snow could possibly interpret that as defiance from them, trying to undermine his Games, especially given year after year Two sent only their best.

Maybe he was overthinking it. Maybe Eunike was like Brutus and would probably leap at another chance to prove worth in the arena to make up for a supposedly poor showing the first time. “Now for the boys—I mean, the gentlemen!” Effie said.

He spread his hands. “Well, looks like I volunteer,” he said with a sarcastic edge, impatient with the farce, stepping forward before she could even reach for the slip. He didn’t look back. There was nobody who would miss him.

The train was unfortunately alcohol-free but given that he had been dry for months and had a focus now—trying to find someone to try to keep alive and send home from the arena—the cravings were far more bearable. He watched the recap of the reapings, wincing as he saw too many old friends mounting the stage. He saw Finnick called for Four, and Mags taking the place of Finnick’s Annie. 

Enduring prep was a pain, literally and figuratively, but he hadn’t been off the whoring circuit so long that the old routine wasn’t unfamiliar yet. He still knew just when to grit his teeth when they were ripping the wax off. At least he managed to sweet-talk Portia into cutting his hair with the justification that he didn’t want it in his eyes in the arena. The chariot ride was no treat, knowing that even Cinna’s and Portia’s best on the costumes with the interesting suggestion of smoldering embers about ready to burst to life wouldn’t be enough. The fact that Eunike rode beside him in stony silence, no hint of any emotion on her face, kept him silent too. 

Glad enough to get away from that, when he went upstairs, waiting for him in the Twelve apartment were Annie Cresta and Mags from Four. “Annie’s taking you on as your mentor,” Mags told him, getting her point across with a combination of her stroke-garbled voice and her hand-signs. Fortunately Haymitch had some experience in understanding both.

At first he thought this was Four undermining him also, sending a girl with no mentoring experience. Then he understood: Mags wanted Annie here to have what moments she could with Finnick before the Games in case he didn’t make it out, but she also didn’t want Annie to have to be directly responsible for either her or Finnick. He couldn’t exactly blame Mags for that. At least it was someone from Four. He was sure Chantilly had been tapped as the One mentor already, and he didn’t trust any other One quite the way he did her.

“Carrick’s agreed to assist her where it’s needed,” Mags added, obviously seeing the comprehension on his face, “so don’t you worry now, you’ll be in good hands.” Carrick was something like a twenty-five year veteran, mentored for several years even before Haymitch himself won, and then carried on until Finnick too his place. He knew her hopes were that Finnick would survive in the end—her volunteering for Annie assured it. But even with that hope committed, she wouldn’t let Four slack off on mentor duties towards him, even if it was a burden they were forced to bear rather than one of choice. But then, none of the victors had ever had the choice towards mentorship in the first place. 

Mags patted him on the shoulder as she turned to leave. “Best that it be Finnick,” she signed to him, without apology and knowing none would be needed for favoring a young man from her own district with hopes and a beloved to go home to, “but if something happens, I’d rather you than anyone else.”

“Thanks,” he said, throat a little tight. He knew the esteem she placed in him with that. He also knew he didn’t much deserve it. “I’ll try to look after him.” They both knew she wouldn’t survive long, and he wouldn’t do her sacrifice the disservice of pretending otherwise.

~~~~~~~~~~

Haymitch approached her the first day of training. “I’m getting an alliance together. Trying to keep Finnick alive, and you too, if I can, long as possible. In or out?”

She wasn’t surprised he was doing his own dealings rather than sending Finnick’s girl to do it for him because Annie probably didn’t have a clue how it all worked. At least he didn’t waste time mincing words. Johanna appreciated that. She also appreciated that he actually gave a fuck enough to give her some priority like that. She was sure he was the only one—well, aside from Blight. “You’d almost think I mattered to you, Haymitch,” she mocked him, tapping the screen to pick out the edible plants. She knew Finnick probably mattered more. That was fine. Finn had something to go home to and people that loved him. She wasn’t much sure she wanted to die for Annie Cresta to have her happy ending, but she’d intended to protect Finnick as long as she could too. “The bitch nobody likes put on equal footing with the Capitol’s golden boy? I’m touched.”

“You’re young, Jo,” he said softly, leaning in. “If it’s you that makes it out, maybe you still have a chance.”

The whole idea made her uncomfortable, even angry, because stupid as she was, him mentioning it tugged at parts of her that ought to remain firmly shut up and locked away. “Because you’ve provided such a fucking stellar example there,” she said. Turning to face him, she looked him up and down slowly, wanting to make him uncomfortable. He’d lost the extra weight and he looked steady and sober and strong. Apparently he’d endured those months of forced training too. “Although you’re not looking too bad, really. Sure there’s not some woman back home drooling over you?” She knew there wasn’t. His district shunned him as much as Seven did her. 

But the urge to lash out and punish him for saying that was right there anyway. “Got any offers on the table for one last fuck before you go die?” They both knew she meant the patrons with cash in hand. She didn’t doubt if Snow was allowing buyers, Finnick would probably be busy this week because he was a commodity that might soon be gone.

“Why, are you offering instead since you’re so fucking free with your favors?” he snapped back, and she knew she’d hit a nerve by bringing up the circuit. She also tried to not show that he’d hit the mark with her and it hurt to have that from Haymitch, of all people.

She shrugged. “Depends what you’ve got to offer me. You’ve been kind of lousy in the past, so I need to know what you’ve got now.” 

He stared at her, grey eyes incredulous. “What?” 

She nodded towards the weapons station. “I meant what have you got for this alliance, brainless?” She hadn’t been referring to the one time in her life Haymitch had fucked her. Or at least, she would pretend she wasn’t, even if she knew it had been a bit of both.

From how forcefully he threw the knives, his irritation obvious, she knew she’d probably won that round. Strangely it didn’t bring her all that much pleasure.

~~~~~~~~~~

In the end, Eunike joined with the Twos and Ones, of course, to make a five-Career alliance. On Day Three he told Johanna and Finnick that along with the two of them, Blight, and Mags, he’d roped in Seeder and Chaff, and Angus from Ten if he could shake his district partner Sandy. The two of them politely refrained from mentioning all of those tributes were even older than Haymitch. He knew that Johanna and Finnick, Sandy, Eunike, Cashmere, and Gloss were pretty much the youngest tributes in there. “It’s something,” Johanna said honestly to him that evening, sitting on the couch in the Twelve apartment with her legs tucked up under her.

She’d spent most of her evenings up here lately anyway. She told him Cedrus kept to himself, as always, and Blight was usually gone from the Seven apartment. She made it clear she didn’t care where he went. Haymitch knew Blight must be in the Nine apartment with Clover, trying to find whatever way to say goodbye to the wife he could only marry by district traditions, and who he only saw a few weeks of each year. 

If in nine years Johanna hadn’t asked and Blight hadn’t seen fit to tell her, he wasn’t going to be the one to explain that situation. At least Finnick was getting to spend time with his Annie. Apparently Snow had cancelled any “dates” just to make the Capitol feel the sting of losing their precious pet victors even more. Or more likely, maybe he just didn’t want to have to deal with the prospect of hurrying victors for Remake before interviews and the arena. 

As for him, it was quiet up in the Twelve apartment every night. Eunike, Annie, and Eunike’s mentor Alcmene had their bedrooms up here because it was expected of them as “Twelve” tribute and mentors, but he knew Annie would be down on the fourth floor with Finnick and the other two women would be in the Two apartment for the evening, busy plotting with Brutus and Enobaria.

It was good to have Johanna there, even if he wouldn’t openly admit that to her. So many summers it had been so quiet up here, with the tributes usually hiding in their rooms scared out of their minds, and after they were dead, it was oppressively silent. He also wouldn’t tell her he understood why she was there: she didn’t want to be alone either during these last few days. He tried to not feel something like pity that the only person she felt she could reach out to for that last human contact was someone like him.

Funny how even as the worst days of his life were approaching, the nights sitting there talking about nothing much, pulling out a game of chess, or making fun of a shitty Capitol movie rerun, were sweet in their own way. 

There was no alcohol in the apartment this year. But it was only the night of watching the training scores, when it all became so much more indelible and he was sitting there with Eunike, Annie, and Alcmene rather than Johanna, that he realized he wanted a drink in a way he hadn’t most nights.

He got an eight. Very respectable—one mark better than his seven at age sixteen, actually. He must have shown them something, going in knowing he’d better prove his willingness to fight, whereas when he was a boy he’d emphasized his survival skills and stealth. Or maybe they marked him a little higher for having survived that Quell, a Games tougher than any other. In any case, he’d have rated himself about a five or a six, so maybe he wasn’t as bad off as he’d thought. Whatever reason, Annie looked hopeful. “Well, that’s good,” she said. Finnick had gotten a ten, Johanna a nine. Mags, joking to him that she’d just taken a nap during her private session, had a two.

Eunike didn’t even look at him. He didn’t expect her to do it either. She might be forced into sleeping up here and wearing a black uniform in the arena but they all knew where her loyalties would be. Her nine would earn her some sponsors and that was probably all she and Alcmene needed.

He wondered if she’d go for him first to take away whatever stain of dishonor she imagined was on her.

~~~~~~~~~~

The interviews were the same old bullshit. It wasn’t hard for her at all for to play feisty and ready for a fight like Cedrus had advised her. Too bad all of the people she wanted to swing an axe at weren’t the ones being stuck under a forcefield tomorrow.

She went up to the Twelve apartment. Haymitch had shed his frock coat and was at the window looking out over the city. Kicking off her shoes, she padded silently across the plush carpet to stand beside him. He didn’t turn to look but he acknowledged she was there when he spoke up, too soft for the microphones. “You saw the audience. There’s talk of a last minute petition being sent to Snow.”

The audience was upset, some were evenly openly weeping. The sight of it had made her all the angrier. As if they had the right to weep, as if anything was being taken away from them. They were like a bunch of spoiled children crying over the loss of a favorite toy, not mourning actual _people_. Next year’s Games, they’d be excited over that victor too, probably even more so for the losses this year. “Tears and pleas don’t sway Snow,” she answered him harshly, fingers clenched on the windowsill, staring out into the bright lights and the neon of the Capitol. At least this would probably be the last time she’d be forced to look at this place she hated, that had stolen everything from her.

“I know.” He was silent after that. What was there left to say now? Asking for one more game of chess seemed like a frivolous thing now rather than the welcome distraction it had been. But all the same, she was reluctant to head back down to the Seven apartment, to finally put away everything but the bitch with the axe she’d have to become in the arena tomorrow.

She didn’t really want to die. But she wasn’t so far gone in her own rage that she couldn’t admit that someone like Finnick didn’t deserve to be the one that walked away more than her. Because unlike him, she didn’t much know how to live. And she wouldn’t walk away from a second round of the arena unscathed. The only question was how much more of what tattered remnants of her soul were left she’d lose in there. The thought of becoming someone who could even kill her best friend just to survive—no, she couldn’t. That would mean the Capitol had finally taken everything from her. She might as well be dead in that case.

Taking in a deep, shuddering breath, she looked over at him, catching his eyes with her. She knew he was coming to that same realization—after so many years of stubbornly existing with no good reason for it, accepting death still wasn’t easy. Looking at his face, his eyes, she saw he was afraid and angry and troubled and yet somehow entirely certain and she thought with an agonized relief, _Well, fuck, at least I’m not alone._

With that came the swift follow-up, _And I don’t want to be alone. Not tonight._ Carefully, he reached over and laid his hand lightly over hers, and she felt the warmth of his skin against hers. He waited until she grasped his fingers in hers to hold on in return, to know his touch was welcome, because he’d been on the circuit and he knew what it was like, so there was no need to explain or to justify.

It wasn’t enough, though. If these were the last hours she’d have for her own before cameras would be wanting her every move and every word, she intended to make the most of it. She’d steal back everything she possibly could that the Capitol had taken, have something that was only hers, even if it was just for one night. Mind made up, she didn’t hesitate. She put her other hand on his shoulder, stretched up on her toes, and kissed him.

For just a moment she felt him yielding to it, felt the surge of hunger in him, heady and raw, and waited for him to kiss her back with that sheer feeling, but then he drew back. “Why?” he asked simply, even as his fingers tightened in hers. 

The truth hurt too much. “Hey, I said you ought to get one last fuck before you die,” she said with a shrug and a cocky, meaningless smile.

His dark brows knitted together and he scowled at her. “Don’t fucking play games with me, Johanna. Not tonight, of all nights. I’m really not in the mood to be the one you scratch the itch with because Finnick’s busy with that girl of his.” He let go her hand and nodded to the door. “You know your way out.”

It was all too close to the surface and as usual, temper rose up first to cover the pain of what felt like rejection. “What, you want me to beg you?” she almost snarled at him, putting her hands on his shoulders to push him away. “Like I practically had to beg you then? You know what, fuck you, you’re _not that good_ anyway!”

But it had been different when she kissed him. She’d felt him there, felt the emotion and passion there seething right below that mask of absolute indifference. When she was a teenager and he’d agreed to fuck her before she endured her first patron, there had been nothing. He’d been just the consummately professional whore doing her a favor. She could tell this wasn’t like that.

“Johanna.” The sound of her name stopped her as she turned to go. He raised an eyebrow and said with a strangely awkward, rueful smile, “Me? _Really_? Your last chance here, you could do better.”

The self-deprecating honesty hurt. She shook her head. “You understand,” was all she said. “What it’s like.” This wasn’t simple lust and a need to be fucked, or something darker, the need to dominate some of those Capitol assholes to feel like she was in control again. She wanted to be comforted. She wanted some small scrap of tenderness for her own. She wanted to feel human before she went into that arena. “I just…don’t want to be alone.”

He didn’t say anything, no wisecrack or wry quip or sarcastic comment. He just nodded and took her hands in his again, leaning down to kiss her. Right before he kissed her, he said in her ear, “It may not be that good anyway. I’m still plenty fucked up. I can’t just…wish it all undone.” She understood: all the years with nobody but the patrons who paid for his body. 

“Doesn’t matter,” she murmured back. “You know I’m fucked up too.” She didn’t care as much about his body, about the pleasure of it. He could be with her tonight, knowing how broken as she was, and still want to be there for her. That was all that mattered.

~~~~~~~~~~

Haymitch wasn’t sure he’d describe it as the best sex he’d had in his life. Although the entries in that category weren’t much to brag about anyway, seeing as almost all of them weren’t by his choice. It seemed like trying fiercely to hold on to reality, to not just drift away to the security of well-trained and empty instincts, made them both hesitant and awkward. They were pausing at most everything, holding back anxiously to see if everything was OK. It felt more like a series of stops and stutters and restarts rather than a smooth flow. He honestly thought for a moment when she openly panicked when he tried to roll her over back against the mattress that was the end of it. But it wasn’t. Pulling her on top of him instead, he waited until he felt her relaxing again, until she kissed him to tell him to go on.

On the last night before he went into the arena to kill some of his friends and to die, someone cared enough to give him this small bit of grace. He’d chosen this. He was only himself to her, and the moments of uncertainty, of waiting for encouragement, only seemed to underscore that.

It was entirely real, not some empty fantasy. When she let out that final gasp of pleasure, and she said his name, soft, almost too soft to hear, as she leaned against him and let him wrap his arms around her, it felt like the sound of it still drowned out the dozens of men and women that had shrieked it, cooed it, moaned it, purred it. They hadn’t really known him at all. She did. So maybe it actually was the best sex he’d had in his life. 

He dozed off afterwards and startled awake at the feel of the dip in the bed as she got up, unused to the feel of someone else there. Instinctively he reached for a knife, but quickly enough saw it was her. He watched, seeing she was getting dressed. His heart fell at that, a little. The light was still on and he tugged the covers over himself, now oddly self-conscious.

For a moment it was on his lips to ask her, _Stay._ Then he realized it was pointless. They were going into the arena tomorrow. What point was there in asking her to stay, in saying that over the last days he’d found himself falling in love with her? 

“Falling in love” seemed all too apt a phrase. She’d already been let down once with Finnick, trusted him to catch her and Finnick had instead let her crash down to the earth. He couldn’t catch her either, not with what was coming in the morning. He’d promised to try to save Finnick if he could, promised to try to keep her alive as long as he could too. That was conflict of interest enough already. He couldn’t take on another burden and swear that for her sake he’d try to stay alive—only one of them would make it out anyway. There was nothing he could offer her, and best to not encourage her to take the leap when she had to fear it because she’d already been left broken and bleeding by it once. “Good night,” he said instead, watching her go.

“See you in the arena,” she said softly, closing the door behind her.

He waited a minute for her to get out the front door and then padded to the bathroom, turning on the shower. He hated these fucking showers, never could quite figure all the buttons out, but tonight he was lucky that the soap smelled like the clean scent of fresh grass in summer rather than roses or the like. He closed his eyes and thought of the Meadow and how he’d never see it again. It was easier than thinking of other things he’d never have, things that he would have to let go of once again before morning so he could do what he had to do.

Pulling on his pajamas he went to go sleep on the couch. He was as comfortable on a couch as a bed anyway after all these years, and he had to get some sleep before morning. He knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep at all in that bed where the scents of sex and Johanna would still linger to haunt him.

~~~~~~~~~~

She wanted to lie there until morning feeling his arms around her and no need to talk because the simple pleasure of that was almost better than the sex. But she couldn’t bear to stay because it would hurt too much to let it go. She’d want too much, feel too much, and there was no way she could go into the arena unguarded like that. Twenty-four in and one out was simple, undeniable, brutal math. There was no hope for it with both of them going in. Now there was just even more reason to hope it was Finnick in the end because the thought of surviving after watching Haymitch die had just taken on a whole new level of horror. She shied away from trying to name everything roiling inside of her, to admit what it was. It didn’t matter whether she was coming to love the stupid bastard or not. That feeling would die in the arena one way or another.

Throat tight and aching with the effort of stifling it, she let herself into the Seven apartment, trying to keep quiet. The light was still shining beneath Cedrus’ door—chances were he was reading. Blight’s room was dark and she didn’t know whether he was there or not. 

It was only in the shower that she finally let herself cry, and only for a minute. Then she forced herself to get a grip and bid that farewell. She’d had that one night to not be alone, and with someone who understood. That was all she had asked for in the first place.

She nodded to Blight in the morning as they headed for the hovercraft. She might not love the old man, but he was going to his death, same as her, and she was sorry for it all the same. “I’m sorry,” he said quietly.

She didn’t know if he meant it the same way she did. The strangely sympathetic look he gave her said otherwise. But caught up in her own thoughts, she just nodded in acknowledgment and held her arm out for the tracker injection, which stung like hell. 

In the stockyard, she dressed in her tribute uniform, pulling on the tan trousers, and the t-shirt and long-sleeved overshirt both in Seven’s deep green. She looked when the preps weren’t looking at her and could see no signs on her body of the night before. Hesitant as they’d been, the sex was careful, almost gentle. She wasn’t used to that, not since Finnick. But it was better that way, to not have a tangible reminder.

Instead she focused on the last day of training, when Haymitch had been drifting around the room, chatting here and there to people, some of whom were in the alliance and some that weren’t. She could sense One and Two’s eyes on him as he made the rounds, trying to guess what he was up to and who his allies would be. To her, he’d said simply, “I don’t know what the arena will be and if we three,” meaning himself, Finnick, and her, “will have a good shot at the Cornucopia before One and Two get there. Whatever it is, use your judgment. If you can grab anyone from our alliance, do it. If we get separated…” 

She nodded, remembering the whistle the lumberjacks used to keep in contact in the woods that she’d taught him. If they used the countersign, it was all fine and good. If they answered with the whistle repeated, that meant the Peacekeepers were breathing down their necks. That was their signal. If she whistled and they didn’t answer it correctly, she’d know to be ready for a fight.

When the platform raised, she stared incredulously at the expanse of salt water. She could flail around enough to not drown on a hot summer’s day in a lake, but sustained swimming was beyond her. “Fuck,” she cursed, hearing the countdown, glancing around her with relief to see Finnick was only two platforms down. He didn’t acknowledge her directly, but she knew he’d seen her when he looked her way for a minute and their eyes met. The only black shirt nearby she saw was on Eunike. There was Chaff, impatiently prowling the few steps of his platform in his brown shirt like a caged wildcat.

She could have screamed in impatience. “Fuck it,” she said finally, telling herself she’d better do something or else. Leaping in, she sputtered at the salt water and started flailing her way towards the strip of sand, surprised that the stupid-looking belt she had on apparently helped keep her afloat. Suddenly someone grabbed her collar and she gasped, inhaling a mouthful of blood-warm salt water, convinced someone was trying to drown her already. 

“It’s me, Jo,” Finnick said. “Let’s face it, you’ll make it to shore faster with me.”

“Shut up, Finn,” she told him, though she relaxed and let him drag her to the shallows.

“Nobody else is going for it yet,” Finnick said, “except Haymitch. He ought to be here in a minute. I think you’ll have a few minutes yet before anyone else manages to flail their way to land. You two go to the Cornucopia and start getting the supplies and weapons for our people. I’m gonna start trying to get Mags, Seeder, and the like, and put them on the far shore.” He nodded towards the beach.

“Got it,” she said, feet already digging into the sand to start sprinting.

“Get me a trident if there’s one!” he yelled, already swimming towards Mags. 

“Yes, your highness,” she yelled back sarcastically, running for it. She was already sorting through the supplies and weapons, tossing some into a pile outside the mouth of the Cornucopia, when she heard a voice.

“We about ready to clear out?” She looked up to see Haymitch standing there, dripping wet, though he obviously understood the plan because he quickly was grabbing knives and the like without even having to ask.

“Make me do all the work,” she grumbled at him, reached for a pair of hatchets that she judged were well-weighted for throwing. Rolling her eyes at an enormous battle axe, she ignored it. As if she could run carrying that damn thing. Gamemakers never learned that a smaller, versatile weapon was far more useful, and it sure as hell was less tiring to use.

“Get the trident,” she directed him, pointing to the weapons rack too high for her to easily reach without leaping for it. Even Haymitch at five ten would have to stretch a little. Obviously it had been put there for the reach of someone tall like Finnick. Not like anyone else in the entire arena was going to be waving a trident around anyway. “Finnick and his fucking fancy weapons,” she said with a snort of amusement.

“Sponsors,” was all Haymitch said, not wasting his breath on prolonged conversation. She knew what he meant. Finnick with his iconic trident was going to appeal to wallets far more than the mundane image of him with something like a spear or a machete. “That it? Let’s go.”

She almost ran straight into Laurence, dressed in Five purple. Apparently someone else could swim enough to make it here, and that meant it was high time to be gone. Arms full of gear and weapons, she couldn’t reach an axe. Her eyes went wide to see a knife suddenly sprout from the man’s chest like it had appeared by magic. Haymitch stepped past her, grabbing the knife and pulling it from Laurence’s chest, stepping aside and watching with something like helpless horror as the other man gurgled and bled out, staining the sand red. “Come on,” she said, shoving his shoulder to snap him out of it, seeing other figures bobbing on the waves growing closer, and spying Finnick waving frantically to her from where he had a group assembled on the beach. 

Scooping up his own pile of gear, Haymitch followed her and she hoped he didn’t look back. The Games had begun.

~~~~~~~~~~

He’d killed Laurence as presumably the first fatality of the Games, unless someone had drowned another tribute. With other people figuring out the flotation belt and closing in, Finnick had to leave Seeder and Blight behind so the rest of them could clear out. It was a pretty shitty morning for both of those things. When they paused for a breather in the jungle and Johanna shinnied up a tree and reported numerous bodies down near the Cornucopia, right before twelve cannons sounded. There were five on the Career alliance: Cashmere, Gloss, Enobaria, Brutus, and Eunike. Five with him also: himself, Johanna, Finnick, Chaff, and Mags. That left only two people still at large out there.

He felt particularly sick when he saw Seeder and Blight's faces in the sky that night and knew they had died because they'd been left behind. But Angus was still alive so perhaps they’d gain him. He didn’t think ahead to what happened when their alliance inevitably would have to break up.

Just like last time the arena held its own particular horrors, and it whittled them all down. Two cannons sounded, and then they lost Mags first, when she sacrificed herself as a diversion to let them all get away from a giant white bear mutt that was twin to the one that had killed most of the tributes in her own Games. Finnick cried that night as the rest of them talked loudly about the arena to cover it.

Angus had died somewhere during the day, maybe the one killed when the giant wave swept the beach. Eunike was an early casualty too, and he closed his eyes for a moment in regret. He hadn’t liked her, but it hit hard that she’d been forced to die on behalf of District Twelve instead of her own. Only Wiress from Three was still at large. 

Golden-furred monkeys attacked them the next day as they lingered a little too long and ended up caught in one of zones of their “clock” they hadn’t figured out. He tried to not think of the memory of fluffy golden squirrels as their teeth and claws slashed his skin and their small bodies piled up. Once the onslaught was over, they found Chaff dying from his torn-open throat. Finnick and Johanna stepped back and let the two of them have privacy.

“You win and you go have a drink and remember me,” Chaff said, giving him a smile with his teeth horribly blood-stained, as Haymitch held his best friend’s one remaining hand and thought about Maysilee Donner dying, so many years ago. Maybe he should have been the one who died that day. He’d done nothing good in his life since. Chaff had a wife and kids back in Eleven. But as always life and the Games were anything but fair, so instead it was Chaff McCormick’s cannon that sounded, and Haymitch reached up with a shaking hand and closed his eyes. He touched his fingers to his lips as the hovercraft took Chaff away, bidding goodbye to a man who’d been like a brother, more so than anyone in Twelve.

He didn’t cry, or at least, he tried not to let it show on camera. Hopefully it looked like he was just wiping sweat off his face. He was grateful Finnick could still feel so deeply and let it show, but he wouldn’t give the Capitol his grief for them to claim. He just shouldered his pack again and said, “Let’s keep moving.” Another cannon sounded as they headed back towards the beach, then one more sounded later that day—apparently the Careers had run into one of the arena’s snags.

~~~~~~~~~~

Those last cannons proved to be Wiress and Brutus. Resting and recovering, the sponsors were generous that night with medication for their monkey wounds, and they quietly thanked Cedrus, Annie, and Carrick for hustling like they had. Finnick grinned and waved the sticks of hard candy that were among the things in the goodie basket. “Sugar stick?” he cooed at her jokingly, and she laughed and grabbed one. The wintergreen flavor was cool and welcome on her tongue in the oppressive heat, like being in a deep forest.

“Thanks, sweetheart,” Haymitch said with a smirk, reaching over to pluck a blue-striped one from Finnick’s hand. He tasted it and dramatically rolled his eyes back in his head like he’d faint from the sheer pleasure of it. “Blueberry. He told her to put blueberry in there. Annie, you’re a darlin’, but I just might have to marry Carrick.”

She laughed at the ridiculousness of his overacting, even as she couldn’t help but think about the look on his face a few nights ago when he came, that genuine look of astonishment and bliss. She reveled in having made him feel like that, and she couldn’t help but rest her hand on his shoulder for just a moment as she passed by, wanting so much more but willing to settle for that little bit of contact. He surprised her by taking her hand briefly in his, squeezing her fingers, and his eyes met hers before he let go. Neither of them looked away for a few long seconds. 

She was startled awake as Finnick raised the alarm that night. She scrabbled to her feet and found her axes just as Finnick gave an odd moan, and even in the artificial moonlight she was horrified as she saw him falling.

She didn’t hesitate, seeing the shadowy figure at the edge of camp, and she launched an axe right into Gloss’ chest where he stood over Finnick with his hookblades with the blood dark on the steel, screaming something as she did it—an obscenity, or maybe just a shriek of wordless grief and rage. She heard the metallic sound of blades meeting and saw Haymitch and Enobaria fighting, Haymitch in his rage like a man possessed. She rushed over to lay into Cashmere before she could backstab Haymitch, yanking the other woman’s long blond hair to expose her throat and hitting her neck with one good chop. 

The clash of steel stopped and she looked up to see Haymitch still standing and Enobaria down. Four cannons sounded all at once even as she raced back to Finnick’s side and with that she realized he was gone already, and she hadn’t even fucking well had the time to say goodbye or hear what he had to say to her. “No!” she screamed, shaking Finnick as if that would somehow bring him back. “You asshole, don’t you dare die on me!” 

That was when she gave in and started weeping, not caring if the cameras saw it, not caring if the world saw it. One of the two people in the world who’d been her friend was dead and nothing could ever be right again because he was supposed to _win_ and go home to that girl he loved so much that he couldn’t have loved her instead, and he’d sworn he would name one of his kids Johanna. He shouldn’t be there on the sand curled in on himself like he was only sleeping but for the blood around him.

Haymitch’s arms were around her and she buried her head in the crook of his neck, feeling how tightly he held her as he too mourned the loss of the best of them. They’d sworn years ago to look after Finnick, when both of them were off the circuit and Finnick was stuck, and now finally they had utterly failed him. “I’m sorry,” he kept saying, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry…” She didn’t know who he was apologizing to—her, Annie, the memory of Mags, maybe everyone who had died in this hellhole.

The hovercraft finally came and took Finnick away and she couldn't bear to watch. “You’re bleeding,” she realized finally, feeling the wetness against her own flank.

“Not bad,” he said, shaking his head, watching the hovercraft go. “Stitches only, I think. It’ll keep. Too bad.”

“Too bad?” she said fiercely. She’d just watched Finnick die and now here he was saying it was too bad he was going to survive his wounds from Enobaria? “Too _bad_?”

“We’re the last two.” He stepped away, clasped his hands behind his back. “So might as well get it over with.”

She realized what he meant with a sense of sick horror and fury. He shouldn’t be standing there defenseless, patiently waiting for her to kill him. “No,” she said, shaking her head. “Hell no.”

“Well I’m damn well not killing you,” he snapped.

“I just watched my best friend die, you lost too many friends in here already too, I’m not gonna be the one that kills the man I…” It hung up in her throat, and suddenly she was conscious of the cameras again. _Fuck them_ , she thought with a swell of rage and despair. If it made them unsettled that someone as unpopular as the bitch with the axe could love someone, they deserved to feel uncomfortable. “The man I love,” she said, hating them for taking this moment when it should have been theirs alone, but feeling triumph all the same because now, finally, she wouldn’t play their part. “So that’s fine if a mutt comes along this beach and something else kills me, but I’m not ever raising a weapon to kill you. Forget it.” 

He looked at her, and then his arms were around her again as he said, “And I don’t want to survive by killing you either. I...I love you. So I can’t do it.” Her heart leaped to hear it, just for a moment, before reality sank in again. “But we can’t do this, not with the Gamemakers. I _know_. They’ll punish everyone else for it,” he said, voice now soft enough for only her to hear and she felt him trembling slightly with the knowledge that after so many years of quiet submission to keep people safe that the two of them were playing with fire here. “Johanna, we can’t…the longer we hold out the more angry Snow will get because we’re defying him. More people will die for it.”

“Don’t you ask me to do this,” she said thickly, shaking her head. “I can’t be that person. You know I've got nothing left already.” She couldn’t kill him deliberately and coldly and go home, pretending she was still any kind of a human being. Particularly with what he had made her feel in those days leading up to the Games, how she’d started to feel even just a little bit alive again, she couldn’t live with it.

“I won’t,” he murmured. “I can’t be that person either. It ain’t worth living if I let them turn me into that. But we have to end it so people will be safe. I won't let them pay for me, not this time. If we’re both gone, that’ll do it. We’ll have paid the price Snow wants. Together?” He touched her face gently. 

“Together,” she agreed. 

Then he smiled a slightly mischievous smile that she thought belonged on the man he would have become if not for the Games. “Snow will probably be glad to get rid of both of us, let’s be honest.”

She laughed, hearing the ragged edge in it. “Take your pick. So many ways to die in this arena.” 

“I didn’t see anything obviously poisonous,” he said, and somehow she wasn’t surprised he’d been keeping track of things like that. “You?”

She shook her head. “No. And I’m not inclined to just start eating all kinds of stuff just hoping something will kill us quickly rather than in four days of agony.”

“If we wait hours for something like the wave that could be too long and Snow could start reprisals. Walking into the monkeys is no guarantee. One of us could survive it.”

“Jabberjays won’t kill us,” she observed wryly, even as her breath caught at the memory of Finnick screaming in anguish over the voice of his Annie, who even now must be sobbing herself sick up in Mentor Central.

He nodded towards the water. “That may be it. The water’s deep enough.” His hand tightened in hers and she knew even as determined they both were, he was afraid, just as she was.

“Look at you, using an arena to your advantage again,” she mocked him lightly. But she suppressed a shudder at the thought of it. “Hopefully it’s quick.” She let go of his hand, reached down and tore at the ragged edge of her overshirt, pulling off a long strip. “Here.” She caught his hand in hers, raising their clasped hands and seeing golden skin against olive. She wound the strip of green fabric around both their wrists and tied the knot. “If they have to try to untangle us,” she explained softly, “that may be enough for whoever holds out a little longer.” The few extra seconds could make all the difference. Her nightmare would be going into that blackness of dying only to wake up on a hovercraft and find out that in spite of her best intentions, she’d survived.

He nodded. Then he leaned down and kissed her with the fierce passion of a man who knew he’d never get the chance again. Maybe all of Panem saw it, but she knew it was just for the two of them, and so she answered it in kind. She didn’t care. She’d written all of them off. This was finally her choice and something that was hers alone. “Goodbye, love,” he said, and the two of them walked towards the water.

They’d just about gotten to chest depth for her and she could hear both of them breathing faster, instinctively fearful of the panic and the pain and then the unknown, when the voice boomed out over the arena. “Stop!”

~~~~~~~~~~

Apparently Snow, in his utter magnanimity, had been so moved by the petition of his people that he’d agreed to let two victors survive in an unprecedented move, to match an unprecedented Games. They’d let Haymitch and Johanna watch his speech from their hospital beds. “The tributes of the future will long be deprived of the mentorship of the victors of their own district as the pool of victors takes years to rebuild. In that spirit, I believe one final death did not serve the purposes of the Games.” Beautifully put together piece of bullshit, really. Haymitch was almost in awe of it.

Fortunately, the phone call for that came to Central Command just as the two of them were about to drown themselves. He wasn't sure if the two of them would have been willing to kill each other if that wouldn't have played out without interruption.

He was also sure that was Plutarch’s doing as second chair Gamemaker, and his playing Seneca Crane like a master. Plutarch may not have been able to undo the Games, but he’d done what he could to preserve the groundwork of that rebellion that had long been in place.

Haymitch was sure he’d intended for Finnick and Haymitch to be the survivors. The secrets that Finnick had been gathering were invaluable, and for all his many fuck-ups, Plutarch insisted Haymitch’s ability to strategize was too important to lose either. That hadn’t worked out quite right. But as Snow placed yet another ugly metal crown on his head, and Haymitch carefully kept his face into a mask of amazed gratitude, he only hoped the cost hadn’t been too high.

“I expect whatever I want of either of you, Mister Abernathy, Miss Mason,” he said softly. “Whenever I demand it, and with no protests and no questions. I hope that’s clearly understood. You seem to have had issues with that lesson in the past.”

Haymitch understood, all right. Snow had let them survive only to have leverage again on both of them, something he’d been missing for years. If only one of them had lived, Snow would have even less hope of keeping either of them in line. But this way, he looked good to the people and he’d gotten his two problem victors more firmly in line than he’d ever had them. Besides, with Finnick and Gloss and Enobaria and other popular victors gone, the dual victors of the Third Quarter Quell would probably be much in demand next year. Someone would have to pick up the slack. He understood too that they would be expected to do that without complaint.

Moving to Johanna, placing the crown on her head, Snow continued, “And should I find that your final act in the arena was motivated by concerns other than your pure and deep love for each other—although I admit the audio feed from your room, Mister Abernathy, the night before the Quell is rather supportive—I will not be pleased.” 

Haymitch gritted his teeth, trying to not respond to the jibe about Snow listening to the audio of the two of them having sex. “Of course,” he said coolly. “But you needn’t worry. We were only thinking about each other.”

Snow’s blue eyes studied his for a moment, sharp and inquisitive, and then he stared at Johanna likewise. Then he smiled. “Wonderful. It’s unfortunate you’ll only see each other in the summertime, of course, with the need for you to still mentor your respective districts. But when there’s a wedding to be held, of course it will be at my expense.” It sounded like a threat. Haymitch knew from that tone there had better be a wedding next summer, and of course Snow would take pleasure in controlling that. “And I look forward to seeing what marvelous children you two will produce.” Another expectation made clear. “I suppose as they’ll be born in Seven they’ll be eligible for the reapings there rather than Twelve, but of course as the father, you do have equal claim there, Mister Abernathy. Hm. That does cause a bit of a dilemma, but I’m sure we’ll have it all worked out by the time it becomes an issue.”

Neither of them flinched as Snow went on, although Haymitch’s stomach lurched sickly at the vision of his future, mingled heaven and hell. He’d _known_ all that, part of why he’d never had a wife and kids, and here he’d played right into Snow’s hands. He couldn’t even bear the thought of those children right now, knowing they would be reaped. It was inevitable.

She slept up in the Twelve apartment with him that night. “We probably ought to…” Knowing Snow was listening in, and probably expecting hearing a happy couple joyfully celebrating their survival with lovemaking, was anything but arousing. “You think he jerked off to that first tape?” he murmured lowly to her, kissing her brow.

She laughed. “Knowing he’s got us under his thumb again? You bet that gave him a raging hard-on.” She raised her voice and said, “You look tired. Do you think you can…”

He caught on immediately. “Give it another day or two. My side still hurts,” where Enobaria had stabbed him. “And I want it to be something memorable for us both, OK?”

“That’s OK. It’s good just…just to be here. I can wait a few more days to get you naked.” She settled down against him with a sigh, and even as he reveled at the feel of her in his arms, the specter of years and years of lies and acting and fear stretched out ahead of him. “I love you. Don’t doubt that. But I wish we’d drowned,” she whispered. “Then we would have been free.”

 _Where I told you to run so we’d both be free,_ and he hummed the song softly to her until she fell asleep. It was hours before he fell into a broken and exhausted sleep himself, and the nightmares of two different Quells followed him there.

The next morning Plutarch woke them up early. “There’s so much to discuss about your interview tomorrow! Not to mention the logistics of a Victory Tour for victors from two different districts—oh my.”

It was really the last thing he wanted to discuss, but there it was. Keeping in mind acting like the relieved couple in rapture over their survival, they sat down with Plutarch on the sofa. Finally, Plutarch shoved a sheet of paper their way, asking brightly, “What do you think of this plan for the set tomorrow? We’ve had to make adjustments in a hurry!”

He read the paper, Johanna leaning over with a hand on his shoulder to read it as well. Among the drawings of set pieces, tiny cramped handwriting read, _Seneca Crane dead._ So Snow had shown his displeasure with Crane’s ability to be influenced.

 _Capitol intrigued by you but no danger there. But districts now support you two as potential act of defiance, rumored near-uprisings in Eight, Four, and Eleven._ Interesting. All he could think of was that miserable, poor, downtrodden people had maybe found something to be inspired by that even the most miserable, isolated, disliked victors could have love that they didn’t want to lose and have friends they grieved deeply. Neither he nor Johanna could be called shining heroes but perhaps people saw themselves reflected more easily in the two of them because of that. So maybe, after all these years, their districts had again found something in them that resonated. Going home to Twelve suddenly made him nervous, unsure of his reception there. At least being loathed, he’d known what to expect. 

_Thirteen says the time is now. Will pick you up from your districts after you get back and get you to safety. Be careful._ The rebellion—it would happen now? He tried to not want to lose his temper and demand to know what had changed and why it had taken twenty-two more deaths to earn that support. But he kept his mouth shut. He wasn’t sixteen and stupid anymore.

Haymitch made sure to spill his water glass on Plutarch’s entire stack of papers when he set it down, wrecking that paper and deliberately smearing the ink as he picked it up. “Oh, fuck!” He shook his head. “Sorry. Looks like I’m still a little tired. My hands were steadier when I was drinking,” he grumbled.

“You’re not drinking again,” Johanna said sternly.

“She thinks she’s the boss of me already, Plutarch,” he quipped.

“We both know I am,” she said with a satisfied smirk. Then she looked at Plutarch. “Anyway, that plan, I like it! Just tell us what to do.”

Plutarch looked at the two of them and nodded. “If anyone can do it justice it’s you two, I suppose. Now, go get your rest!”

“All we need is Effie saying we’ve got a big, big, big day tomorrow,” Haymitch groaned. As Plutarch got up he leaned in close to Johanna. “So we’ll fight them,” he told her softly. 

“Good,” she answered. “That’s what we do best.” He kept hold of Johanna’s hand, and as Plutarch left, for the first time since seeing Snow’s announcement, he let himself feel a spark of hope, and felt like the pressure of years had finally been released. They’d fight back, finally, for their murdered families, for their dead tributes, for the suffering in their districts, for the many friends slain in the arena—for Finnick and Chaff and Mags and Seeder and all the rest. For the children they might have someday, and everyone else’s children, to no longer fear the arena. After years of mutely enduring, now they and Panem might finally _act_.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the April challenge prompt of _hope and rebirth_ at the Bread and Circuses ficathon.
> 
> Also incorporating a prompt from jadajasmine of: _johanna mason: please know that my quiet is not ignorance or indifference but a constant struggle to find the right way to say I care._

As Plutarch had passed on, Thirteen picked her up from Seven the night after she got back on the train. On her arrival, she endured the well-wishes and cheers from a somewhat confused District Seven that had to face the notion that they’d been wrong about her for years. She was glad, as were they, to cut the questions short. It was all still too much to talk about; those unguarded moments in the arena had been for Haymitch and Finnick, not everyone in the country. She still wasn’t ready to try to justify and explain herself, at least not honestly. She’d stuck to the script for their victor interview, and only holding Haymitch’s hand the whole time had helped, reminding her they were together in the ordeal.

That night, slipping away from the winter town and hiking a couple miles to the clearing where the hovercraft was cloaked and waiting for her signal, was almost too easy. Snow obviously wasn’t expecting any trouble from either of them. Getting to Thirteen and seeing Haymitch already there, having successfully slipped the fence around Twelve’s town himself and run away, she’d thrown herself into his arms without reserve, holding him close, glad to see him alive and well still. 

She’d been afraid that somehow his own rescue would fail, and he would die out there in the woods or be captured and she wouldn’t have been there to say goodbye, she wouldn’t have been there for him, and he was the only person she had left. Everyone else was gone but he was OK and so long as that was true life was remotely bearable, if only just. 

She was admittedly a little pissed when she realized that Plutarch was right there with his camera crew to film their reunion. Of course they immediately turned it into a propo.

The joy of being together again, with the dizzying prospect of a rebellion and freedom, was swiftly crushed. Within a week, they found out when Snow had realized that his two pet victors had instead slipped the leash, he’d taken his fury out on Seven and Twelve. They hadn’t thought, but they should have known: with Snow, someone always paid the price.

Snow had counted on the two of them capitulating when they saw the devastation their defiance could cause. The mere threat of it had been more than enough for years, so she knew he’d certainly planned on the reality of it being ample incentive. That afternoon, in Command, the television had flickered to life with the pompous Capitol fanfare for an announcement. Snow had showed the scenes of the devastation for the entire country to see, knowing Haymitch and Johanna must be watching. The images of public executions, destroyed homes, desperate men and women pushed to the edge by unattainable quotas, announcements of cessation of food supplies, had all been carefully calculated to chip away at their resolve. “Surrender, stop this farce, and mercy will be shown to your districts,” he boomed at the end, face a portrait of righteous wrath.

All total bullshit, of course, because she and Haymitch both knew their districts had rejected them if anything. But of course nobody should suffer for them. They had tried to kill themselves to keep that from happening, hadn’t they?

Thirteen wouldn’t let them share a room without a marriage certificate, and he hadn’t asked her for a Thirteen marriage ceremony. Probably because two minutes for signing a paper saying they agreed they were married seemed so pointless, so void of any feeling or significance, she’d just as soon not bother. If he wanted to marry her, she wanted to wear blue and plant a pair of lovers’ trees with him, and do whatever the hell they did in Twelve for a wedding. She wanted any marriage of theirs to _mean_ something, and she damn well wasn’t going to do it just because Alma Coin tried to tell them so. Besides, she’d quickly found out they were so rule-bound it gave her pleasure to tweak them where she could by ignoring their stupid rules. So she just went to his room every night anyway. Sex hadn’t come up again just yet. It seemed like most of the nights it was all too much, like tonight, and they just curled up together, holding on tight.

They both knew suffering all too well to not feel for those enduring it. But surrendering to Snow, and the probability of that miserable life, was impossible. “He won’t kill us. But he’ll keep us alive and do what he said when he crowned us as the victors,” she told him.

“I know,” he answered. “I know.” The forced wedding, being obliged to bear kids that would be reaped, the misery of seeing each other only during the Games each year, being put back on the circuit—she couldn’t take it. “He may try to do worse than that, if he can think of it. He won’t kill us, though. He’ll need us as the examples.” He sighed, breath stirring lightly against her cheek. “That leaves us exactly where we were in the arena. We could try to remove ourselves from the equation so he’ll leave off them.”

She laughed darkly. “Everything’s locked down so tight here…maybe there’s some nightlock in the woods topside.” That would be quick—one bite on a mouthful of berries and they’d be dead almost before they could swallow.

“I’ll have to think, but honestly, I’ve got no idea what we do,” he said helplessly. “Even offing ourselves might be too little, too late—this has gotten a lot bigger than us.” That scared her more than anything; Haymitch who always had a plan, or a quip at least, seeming so lost.

That night was long and what sleep they got was fragmented, threaded with nightmares. She dreamed of having somehow been the one that killed them all: her axe was embedded in Finnick’s skull and he was leading an army of dead who all looked at her with accusing eyes. Haymitch’s sleep was no more peaceful and neither of them spoke about what they dreamed, but she thought they didn’t really need to say when it was so obvious.

They woke up to a changed world because Seven and Twelve had struck back. Plutarch claimed it was because they didn’t want to lose the powerful inspiration of the lovers they had so recently embraced. Haymitch shot her a look out of bloodshot grey eyes surrounded by dark smudges of fatigue, and shook his head. She nodded in agreement. She couldn’t imagine she and Haymitch were _that_ fucking inspiring. She figured their districts had finally just gotten tired of being beaten down, and decided they’d rather take the risk rather endure than the near-certainty of eventual oblivion.

~~~~~~~~~~

The water was spilled and there was no getting it back into the pail, so far as Haymitch was concerned, but he couldn’t help but watch the progress of things anxiously. The rebellion seventy-six years ago had failed and the country was still paying for that every year with starvation and terror and the lives of children. If this one didn’t succeed, the cost would be far more dreadful, and he tried to not imagine the details of it.

He had a stirring of pride in Seven, and particularly in Twelve. He held few illusions they were actually fighting for his sake, like Plutarch claimed, but knowing how small and poor and vulnerable his home was, to see they had come together for that all-or-nothing push for fight for their freedom stirred something in him nonetheless. 

After Plutarch gave them the news at breakfast, they were summoned to Command. Like good well-trained dogs, they heard a president’s command and responded. Following Johanna through the blast door, seeing how her body suddenly tensed beneath the drab grey shirt at the sight of Alma Coin, he could only agree. The woman set him ill at ease. Maybe it was austerity rather than indulgence that characterized Thirteen, but he got the same unnerving sense that to Coin, just like Snow, people were nothing more than convenient tools to be used and discarded and even destroyed if need be. One life held no intrinsic worth to her, only the value of what use she could make of it.

“District Twelve has been taken by the rebels,” she informed Haymitch coolly as he took a seat at the table. “The fighting continues in Seven, apparently.” He couldn’t help a spark of irritation as he wondered if she was judging Seven for not getting it done in one fell swoop.

He shrugged. “Easier for Twelve when it’s pretty much one population center all together at night.” Almost all the mines were within a daily train trip for the miners. Only the anthracite mine far up north was really beyond that, and that was only a few weeks’ work each year for about a third of the crews; he knew for a fact that nobody would have been there until August anyway so it would have been undefended. “Seven’s out at their camps, yeah?” They would have been pulled in to their district center in the southeast along Lake Sawyer for the mandatory viewing of the Games, of course, and Johanna told him during that time they worked the mills and workshops, as they did in winter.

“Yeah,” Johanna confirmed with a nod, sitting back in her chair and crossing her arms over her chest. “They had to hang around the winter town a few extra days after the Games until I got back so there would be people to film, but pretty much an hour after I got there, they were shipping ‘em back out to the logging sites. So it’s pretty much gonna be taking the district over camp by camp. May take a little while, but,” she shrugged and gave Coin a fierce, wolfish smile, “we all know what someone from Seven can do with an axe in their hands, right?” 

“The news overall is very encouraging,” Plutarch broke in with an overly-bright smile, though Haymitch saw his brow was puckered with worry. Brandishing a green marker, he started making a list on a pad of paper hung on the wall. “Twelve has been taken, Ten was taken in just a few days really, Seven, Four, Nine, Eleven, and Eight are all fighting hard and are at least in majority rebel control…”

“That’s only a little over half the districts,” Haymitch made the crashing statement of the obvious. “One, Two, Three, Five, Six? They’re the core districts, closest to the Capitol. We’ve gotta take them if we’re going to take the Capitol down.”

“Ah.” Plutarch licked his lips a little nervously. “Well, One and Two are Career, of course, so their loyalty will be harder won—Four rebelled out of respect for Finnick and Mags, naturally. And for the rest, the Capitol has, well…”

“Having lost their food supply districts among others, they’re heavily fortifying Three, Five, and Six to control the medicine, technology, power supply, and transportation,” Coin cut him off briskly. “I told you, Heavensbee, this had to be a concerted effort with all the districts rising at once. What do we have now? The shepherds and tractor drivers and coal miners and lumberjacks,” Haymitch heard the derision clear in her voice, “while the toughest nuts to crack, and some of the most valuable supplies, are even deeper in Capitol control now. I don’t need bolts of tweed to win this war.”

“With Four, Nine, Ten, and Eleven in our hands, we do control the entire food supply, ma’am,” one man pointed out, a rather junior looking officer by the look of him. “They probably have some limited warehouses, but…we could wait them out?”

“No,” someone else spoke up. Boggs, one of Coin’s colonels, silver-haired and blue eyed. To Haymitch’s eyes, he looked almost like he’d originally been a Ten native with that coloring. “They have Six, mind, and that means they have all those hovercraft. They’ll bomb the hell out of us while we’re trying to starve them out. Plus they’ll probably be twice as hard on the districts they still have underneath their control.”

Coin turned on Plutarch again. “It was _your_ responsibility for the public mood to incite rebellion. You assured me the time was right.” She turned and next eyed Haymitch and Johanna.

“Yep, we’re still here,” he told her flippantly. “Good of you to notice.”

“He told me you two could get it done. That you would inspire people. “ Her near-colorless pale grey eyes raked them up and down. “I’m not seeing it, Soldier Heavensbee. Maybe you overestimated the appeal of two people who obviously didn’t even have the respect of their own districts, let alone the nation?” She shook her head. “Do your job and fix this, and get the rest of the districts in this war,” she gave it to Plutarch with the air of a command. 

Plutarch sighed, dropping his marker to the table, and held his head in his hands, fretfully rubbing his face for a moment. Then his blue eyes peered from between his spread fingers. “So we need to inspire the nation,” he said, and it was a measure of his grim determination that his usual glib cheer had faded from his voice. “Tomorrow we’re taking you to District Twelve for a propo.”

Johanna’s fingers found his underneath the table and clutched tight.

~~~~~~~~~~

Johanna hadn’t been back to District Twelve ever since her Victory Tour, eight and a half years ago now. War hadn’t improved it. Some of the miners’ shacks looked like they had been burned down, and the school had been turned into a makeshift hospital for the war wounded. “Perulla,” Haymitch greeted a blond woman about his own age as they stepped through the door.

“Haymitch,” she answered politely, wiping her bloodstained hands on a towel. Johanna heard the muffled moan of someone in pain. “Perulla Everdeen,” she said, finally noticing Johanna. She held out her hand, looked down at the streaks of blood on her fingers, and moved as if to pull it back. Before she could, Johanna reached out and took it, shaking her hand. She’d had blood on her hands before, and not from anything as well-intentioned as healing. The momentary thought of Cashmere’s blood spraying her made her suppress a shudder only with effort. 

“I’m the district apothecary,” Perulla told her. No wonder the woman looked so frazzled. Trying to try people who’d been flogged, beaten, shot, burned, or endured any number of other punishments or war wounds, with what amounted to a few herbs and a lot of hope, had to be an overwhelming task.

“We brought you some supplies,” Haymitch told Perulla. “Bandages. Sutures. Anti-infection injections. Morphling. I figured it might be bad so I got ‘em to hand some stuff over. There’s some crates being brought here with all of it.” Johanna saw the older woman’s blue eyes light up with gratitude.

“Thank you.”

Haymitch shifted uncomfortably as if he wasn’t used to hearing those words. Maybe he wasn’t. “How is it?”

“At least the fighting’s done,” Perulla sighed. Wisps of her blond hair were escaping from beneath a faded blue kerchief. “You’ll have to ask Mayor Undersee for official counts, but I think it’s close to a thousand dead between the executions and the fighting. As for how many we may lose yet to injury…” Her mouth tightened into a grim line.

He gave a hasty nod. “Would you want to tour the ward?” Perulla inquired politely.

Plutarch, camera crew at the ready, eagerly said, “It would be some wonder—“

Johanna cut him off with, “So what d’you think, Haymitch?”, not interested in hearing about the propo opportunities. They may not have readily embraced him any longer, but it still had to be hard for Haymitch to think of neighbors lying there broken and bleeding. She waited.

Finally he gave a low sigh and nodded again. “I got ‘em into this mess,” he muttered half to himself, “least I can do is show up.” With that he squared his shoulders and headed into the lunchroom that had been turned into a makeshift hospital ward. Johanna and Perulla followed close behind. Obviously they’d done the best they could to clean things with strong soap—probably lye, much like in Seven—because the smell of shit and piss and blood and burned meat and rotting flesh in the summer sun was faint, but it was there all the same. From then on, Johanna thought she always would remember that as the smell of a slow dying.

~~~~~~~~~~

He pushed his way into the lunchroom, the first time he’d been back here since he was a sixteen-year-old kid himself. The immediacy of the whimpers and groans and the people laid on out makeshift pallets chased away any memories he might have summoned of Jonas, Briar, and Burt, or even Ash at a different table. Perulla moved past him, going to the first patient. He realized with embarrassment he didn’t even know who she was. Seam, that much was clear, but he felt like he ought to recognize her. Which was maybe a little ridiculous given nine thousand people in the district, and yet, it stung all the same and seemed like a mark of how far separate from them he’d become.

“Lily,” Perulla said, “how’s the leg feeling today?” Haymitch managed to not glance at the stump wrapped in bloody linen where Lily’s right foot had once been. 

“Been better,” Lily said with dry understatement.

“How would you rate your pain, one to ten?”

Lily hesitated, and Haymitch saw the sheen of sweat on her brow. “More than willowbark tea’s gonna handle. That’s all that matters.”

“We have morphling now,” Perulla answered. “Haymitch brought it from Thirteen.” Now Lily’s eyes, grey Seam eyes like his own, moved to him, and to Johanna by his side. Her face was drawn tight with pain.

“Well, maybe you left us to deal with Snow’s shit for you escaping him, but at least you came back, and you made ‘em give us supplies,” she said matter-of-factly. “That’s something.” _That’s not much,_ Haymitch interpreted. 

This was stupid. Did Plutarch really think he’d walk into a room full of people in pain, some dying, some crippled for life, and they’d just light up and count themselves blessed because Haymitch fucking Abernathy and his sweetheart graced them with his presence? After all the years they’d spent essentially just tolerating him? He felt all the more awkward and ashamed at the idea of their suffering being exploited for a camera. Maybe Coin was right, maybe Plutarch had seen something that wasn’t there at all. Whatever power to inspire he might have had was something that belonged to a teenage boy, not the man he’d become.

Anything he could say as attempted justification or encouragement just sounded trite and loathsome to him, so he only nodded and said, “I’m doing what I can.” Poor little, as always, that it was.

“Thanks for coming,” Lily told Johanna. “Not your district, so…”

“We’re all in it together now,” Johanna said with an awkward shrug. Haymitch could practically sense Plutarch silently screaming in frustration.

He looked over his head at Plutarch and shook his head. The man wasn’t going to get his shots of the two of them tenderly holding hands and whispering words of encouragement in grateful ears. The best they could do was give over the supplies they had and leave these people to their dignity. Johanna stopped to talk to Perulla, and he moved away from Lily to chat with Plutarch. He was grateful the man gestured for his crew to stop filming this disaster of a propo. “Coin needs to send more supplies,” he told Plutarch, looking over the room filled with broken bodies. “Look at this.”

Plutarch hesitated, his eyes meeting Haymitch’s. “With Three still in Capitol hands, you know medical supplies are going to be prioritized for soldiers in the field. You were lucky to get the few crates she would send, and those were mainly because we convinced her it would be good for the propo.”

He gritted his teeth, hating Coin and her callousness, where everything was about whether it fit her needs or not. “They need it, Plutarch. What’s the point in fighting if everyone’s dead of injury or infection?”

Plutarch looked at him, expression almost apologetic, “Then you’d better give her what she wants. She wants something to fire up the nation, she wants the two lovers who defied the Capitol and showed us that everybody has something they’ll fight and sacrifice to keep.”

Haymitch let out a strangled laugh as he headed for the door, pushing his way out of the school and into the fresh air of a Twelve summer. _Give her what she wants._ He’d always been good at acting the obedient little whore, hadn’t he?

~~~~~~~~~~

She met a few people at the hospital and they seemed vaguely grateful to have her there, to have the concern of someone who wasn’t even from their district. But they had their own shit to attend to, so chitchatting with Johanna Mason wasn’t exactly high on the list.

It took a while to find Haymitch. Finally she found him out behind the school, inside what looked like the worn loop of a running track. He was looking at an old tower-like structure made of logs, near a rather pathetic swing set and a scuffed-up patch of dirt and grass that barely passed for a baseball field. The tower was treated oak, made to last, though it was weathered and she could see where the bolts were now loosened from wear.

“We used to climb that, when we were just littles,” he said, nodding to it. “Tell each other what we saw, make up big stories about what might be out there far beyond the border. I used to dream I’d get out of here, go somewhere.” He gave a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “I went somewhere, all right. Never really came back either.”

She understood what he meant. “None of us came back from the arena.” Little Hanna Mason had died in there the moment she’d killed another child to save her own life. The girl went in. The victor came out. The second time was even worse—the victor went in. She wondered if a monster came out. She felt like she could barely stand what she’d become some days. Though she hadn’t been willing to kill him, not even to save her own skin. That was something still human left within her. Thinking of Finnick curled in on himself in the sand looking strangely small and so alone in death, like the fourteen-year-old child he’d been rather than the man of twenty-four, she pushed the memory away only with fierce effort. 

He looked over at her and nodded. “And now here I am, still trying to come on back, dumb shit that I am, and bringing Capitol camera tricks with me as usual to tell ‘em who I am.” He shook his head, palm resting against one of the supports of the tower, fingers spread and tensed. “No matter. It is what it is and it’s gotta be done. Let’s just get this fucking propo over with and give Plutarch what he wants.” 

So it was that twenty minutes later they were trying to shoot the damn thing in the courtyard in front of the school. “You’ve just come from viewing the hospital and it was dreadful, and this is Haymitch’s home district with people he knows in there,” Plutarch coaxed. “You’re in love! What would be the natural reaction?”

Johanna felt like she was trying to please a demanding teacher as she answered stiffly, “He’s probably upset and I probably try to comfort him.” How the hell to do that, she wasn’t quite sure. She knew how to straddle him and fuck him—although they’d done that so carefully the one night and never since—but this? She’d acted for so many years as the bitch with an axe who didn’t give a damn about anyone or anything. Those few moments they’d captured in the arena had been genuine, the grief for Finnick’s death and then the determination to not lose Haymitch too. But today she felt awkward, wooden; far more naked than when they’d given her just a couple scraps of fabric to wear and sent her out to shoot publicity photos.

She didn’t know how to console him, how to put aside that prickly self-preservation and open herself up to him like that. The awareness that it was prompted rather than inspired by her own feeling, and the ever-voracious cameras being right there, just made it far worse. So she was thinking frantically, _What will look good, what will they expect?_ rather than simply following instincts as she touched his arm and he looked at her with a gaze of barely suppressed anguish that she realized was due to far more than just his helplessness at the hospital. He honestly looked like an animal caught in a trap. 

“It’s all right, I’m here, you’re OK,” she was babbling all kinds of inane nonsense, even as she moved in to just kiss him and shut herself up and just _end_ it. 

Alongside the anxiety was a steadily growing rage. This was theirs, something precious, and now they were expected to give it over to a Capitol-born camera crew to be molded and shaped into something new, a story for the nation to inspire them. _I’ve never had anything,_ she wanted to scream, _I’ve had to give everything and be exactly what the cameras demanded, and now you want this too._

Johanna could act, wouldn’t have survived this long if she couldn’t. So even as the cameras would see only two lovers tenderly kissing and reassuring each other after the horrors of war-torn District Twelve, the kiss was actually awkward and inside she was raging, because this moment shouldn’t have been anyone’s but theirs. _Fuck Plutarch, fuck this propo, fuck the whole ‘star crossed lovers’ shit._ Haymitch must have felt her gathering rage, how she needed to lash out and feel in control of _someone_ in her powerlessness, and because he was the one kissing her and forcing her into that place, he received the full brunt of her anger and aggression. She felt the moment he transitioned back into his old rut too, knew exactly when he went emotionally dead on her and suddenly it was empty and she was just kissing a well-trained whore acting on command. That loss of everything real between them, even broken and anxious as it was, hurt more than anything. She’d never wanted it to be like this. 

Haymitch was the one who broke it off first. He looked over at Plutarch, cameras still rolling, and she saw his grey eyes were glittering dangerously with a barely-suppressed fury of his own. “We’re not doing this again, Plutarch.”

Plutarch threw up his hands. “Haymitch, Johanna, you _know_ we’ve got to have some—“ The exasperation in his tone made him sound like he was dealing with two errant children.

“ _Shut the fuck up!_ ” In all the years she’d known him, she didn’t think she’d ever heard Haymitch yelling in actual temper. Irritated snark, definitely, but genuinely just losing his shit? Standing there next to him she could sense the tension of rage in him, the barely-leased potential for violence. No, little teenage Haymitch hadn’t come back, and this man was what the Capitol had ruthlessly broken and reshaped, over and over. “You people in the Capitol never want to listen, never think we’ve got anything worthwhile to say, so you’re damn well going to do it for once.” He paced a little closer to Plutarch and Johanna noticed the camera crew taking a step back. “I’ve had to fuck on command, act on command, play whatever role that got shoved on me, be exactly whatever I had to on camera, since I was a kid. I’m damn good at it and I’ll act my ass off and say whatever you need to shut Coin up, but Johanna and me? From now on that’s off limits. I’m not whoring that out for your propos.” With one last look at Plutarch, glare still fiercely defiant, he turned and walked away.

She gave him about thirty seconds head start. Nobody made a sound in all that time and it was as if they were all frozen, watching him just walk up the hill that she presumed led towards Victors’ Village. Finally she looked at Plutarch and said, “You all stay here.” None of them would do any good right now. “I’m going after him.”

“Oh, good, maybe you can talk some sense…”

“Shut up, Plutarch,” she said. “He’s right. Just…film some other shit around here for now.”

As she left she heard one of the camera crew ask Plutarch in a tone of confusion, “What was he talking about?” _Plutarch’s gonna get to explain that one,_ she thought grimly.

~~~~~~~~~~

He hadn’t bothered to lock the door when he went down the hill to the square for Reaping Day. No point when he never expected to return. Just the same, he left it unlocked when he went to Thirteen, slipping away in the night. The doorknob turned easily, still unlocked, and he quickly found that once again there were no signs anybody had been in the house in his absence. Despite the temptations of things there that starving and poor people could easily use, either their fear or Snow or their disgust with him had kept them away.

Upstairs in his bedroom, he was sitting on the bed with the well-handled photograph of himself, Ash, and his ma, taken the summer before his Games. He had no pictures of himself with Briar and he could hardly have asked the Wainwrights for a precious family picture of her when he was the cause of her death. Chances were the first one they could have expected to have together would have been their wedding photo. Sometimes he still looked at the book of class pictures from that last spring, to remind himself just she had looked like.

Hearing quiet footsteps, he knew who it would be. “I never packed up before I left,” he said. “I debated it. All that last week before the reaping. Figured I should…make it easy. Because the next people to come in this house would just be cleaning it out. To throw it all away. They wouldn’t want anything of _mine_.” He looked down at the picture, clutched tight in his hands. “But I couldn’t put them away. I was the last person left who gave a damn and…this picture, all their things, they’d just end up burned with all the other trash.”

She sat down beside him carefully. She didn’t ask why he’d retreated here, of all places, because she must know. This was where he’d hidden himself for years. The solitude was unbearable a lot of the time, but sometimes this place felt like the only one that was safe.

“We can’t be what they want,” she told him, “Plutarch’s cute little movie-star couple...did we really think anyone would believe that, about _us_?”

“I think we were too busy being grateful to survive.” He shook his head and gave a bitter bark of laughter. “At the time, anyway. There were so much better people in that arena than me…” He thought of Chaff, blood gushing from his torn throat with every beat of his heart. Mags, torn to pieces by that bear mutt. So many deaths and each of them someone known to him, and he would never be clean of it. Bad enough to be a killer, but to be turned loose on people he had known and in many cases cared for, was even worse.

“It’s never the good ones that make it out alive,” she said in a voice barely above a whisper. “But we wouldn’t become as bad as they wanted. We wouldn’t kill each other. Much as they don’t like us, at least we showed them that.”

He didn’t know how to do this, how to open up and let her in. Fear and that sense of finality had cracked the door a little that last night before the arena. It was a far different thing to love her as best he could for one night, try to give her all that was left of him as a goodbye. The idea of a lifetime, and the demands of that, still overwhelmed him. But it seemed at least this was the one honest thing he had left in his life, so he carefully put down the picture and leaned over to kiss her. Nothing theatrical, like on camera, simply seeking to give and take reassurance, to not be alone right now. _Are you still with me?_

~~~~~~~~~~

She’d wondered if and when sex would come up again. It seemed like both of them were waiting on something, maybe on each other. If he’d been anyone else, she would have just shoved him against a wall or back against a mattress and gotten right at it. But she remembered the slow caress of his hands on her skin and how he’d tried to be gentle with her even when she couldn’t stand it, and she knew it couldn’t be like that. That had mattered. _He_ had mattered. Maybe nothing they could have now would measure up. In some ways she wondered if that one night, and that declaration in the arena, was all they were really good for. Love didn’t always last, did it? Without the pressure of imminent death, maybe they just couldn’t do it.

What could she say to him now? Bitchiness wasn’t going to help, or anger or feigned indifference. They knew each other better than that, and they’d let each other too close to just back away and pretend it had never happened and it meant nothing. She cared, she knew that, she even loved him as much as she could love anyone, but she just didn’t know what to _say_. She didn’t know how to be, or what to do. So when he kissed her that was almost an agonizing relief because it eliminated the need for words. This was the right way to say it, the only way she could bear.

Her arms slid around him, fingers of one hand tangling in his black hair as she kissed him harder, urging him on. Before long her other hand was yanking at the buttons of his shirt.

That was when he startled a little and drew back. “Not like this,” he said, shaking his head, half-turning away from her.

“Why not?” she demanded, feeling the cold slap of rejection and the shame and panic that followed. “You only want to fuck me as a dying wish? Huh? Was all that in the arena just bullshit?”

Silver-grey eyes held hers. “You really want me to fuck me right here, right now, more than _anything_ in the world, or is this just a ‘Fucking you is only thing I can think to do’ kind of a moment?”

She didn’t answer. He gave a tight little nod. “I want more than that,” he told her softly. “I want to give you more than that.”

Those words pushed at something within her, something locked up tight. It scared the shit out of her. “Plutarch’s little romantic script going to your—“

“Oh, fuck Plutarch’s script! We listen to that, he’s going to be filming our damn wedding in about two weeks as a ‘wartime necessity’. ”

Looking down at her hands, she said through the tight lump in her throat, “Fuck you, Haymitch. You know that’s all I really know how to do.” Sex was the only thing she could rely upon, the only thing she was certain she could give him.

Cautiously, his arm went around her shoulders. The solid weight of it was reassuring and instinctively, she found herself leaning into him. “I know, me too,” he said lowly. “But in the arena…we managed more. Maybe we can get there again. If we’re sleeping together again, I want it to be because I can’t keep my damn hands off you, not because it’s the only way I can give you anything.” 

He was talking about the difference between desire and desperation, she realized, and while she wanted him—fuck, how long had it been since she actually _wanted_ one particular person rather than just whoever was handy?—the latter was wound all through it too tightly to separate easily. _I care too much about you to have sex with you right now_ was a little bit of a weird way to go around it, but it made sense. He wanted it to be different from old habits. So did she, come to think of it. “So what next, genius?”

~~~~~~~~~~

For a moment he’d been afraid she’d just snarl and shove him away, that trying to ask for something more than simple comfort would be asking too much. Words said in the heat of the moment didn’t necessarily translate well. But she listened, and he could sense her acceptance of it.

He kissed her by way of answer. Gentle, not because she was too weak or afraid to bear more heat, but because he wanted her to have this, the best and kindest he could give. He wanted to kiss her just out of love rather than something all mingled with lust and a terrified need for her. 

Her fingers clutched at him as she kissed back, a little insistent, a little demanding, and he had the feeling she would always kiss like that but that was OK, it was simply Johanna. She wouldn’t be herself if she wasn’t pushy and honest. “I don’t know,” he told her. “But I want to find out.”

“Bet you say that to all the girls,” she scoffed jokingly. “That you respect them too much to fuck them.” He wasn’t insulted; he knew she wasn’t just being oblivious to the reality. She knew and she was just teasing him.

“Nobody,” he said, shaking his head. “Certainly not in this house.”

She looked at him, something flickering for a moment in her green-tinged brown eyes. “Nobody’s ever lived here besides you, have they?”

“No. My ma, my brother, they died a couple days before we were due to finish the move.” Nobody else had ever lived here with him. Nobody had really visited after the first year or two, until Cray and his Peacekeepers came knocking on the door this spring. “Nobody’s ever been in this bedroom, except me.” The Capitol doctor had kept him down in the living room while he was detoxing. _Nobody’s ever slept in this bed besides me,_ he thought. The sight of her there, on the old quilt his ma had made, was a little strange. 

She surprised him when she kicked off her shoes and lay down. Propping herself up on an elbow, she raised her eyebrows. “I promise we’ll keep the clothes on. But might as well get comfortable.” Following likewise, he lay down too—his side of the bed, as usual, and she carefully maneuvered herself up against his side, his arm around her. It felt good, like the comfort of holding her in Thirteen, but being here in this place with her rather than that sterile metal box of his assigned compartment, felt like so much more.

“Plutarch,” she prompted. “We’ve gotta give him _something_ or Coin’s going to shit a redwood.”

He thought about it. Her head was tucked on his shoulder, her hand on his chest. His breath lightly stirring her short brown hair, as he breathed in the scent of her. Home and Johanna both; it felt strangely good. As if her being here leached away some of the awful layers of loneliness that had built up over the years. Keeping his voice low still, wondering if Snow’s bugs were still active, he said, “So we have to inspire the nation. But without forcing some fairy tale script on the two of us. What do we have that will rile people up?”

“Loads and loads of irritating snark?” He smiled in spite of himself, laughing a bit.

~~~~~~~~~~

It felt good to hear him laugh, even if it was that dry, acerbic little chuckle he had. She wondered just what he’d sound like with a full, deep laugh. “Fine. You come up with something better.”

“Get two cuter people to give them a nice romance?” he offered sarcastically. 

“You can’t see it, but trust me, I _am_ rolling my eyes.”

“Let’s face it. People aren’t going to fight for someone else’s love story. Risk their lives just in the name of our little happy ending.” His arm around her tensed a little bit. “We’ve gotta give them something to fight for. Something greater than the fear.”

She thought about it for a few long minutes. “The truth,” she said finally. “That’s the only thing that’s gonna work, isn’t it?”

Twenty minutes later Plutarch was fussing and grumbling about having to set up lights for a shoot in the evening on the green of Victors’ Village. But when it was all put together, and she and Haymitch took their places on a bench by the pond, Plutarch held up five fingers and slowly put them down one by one to give them a countdown. It didn’t matter. She and Haymitch were old hands at being on camera by now.

“I’m currently here in District Twelve,” Haymitch started, and cleared his throat, “because Coriolanus Snow has decided to make my district pay for my escape, my role in starting this rebellion. People here have died already. More are going to die yet. I thought about giving up, surrendering. But it won’t do any good. By this point it’s gone too far. Others are already fighting. And they’re not fighting for me or for Johanna Mason. They’re fighting for their own freedom, for the lives of the people that they love.”

Johanna didn’t know how she sensed it, but she was sure he wanted her to pick up and run with it a ways now. “This is what Snow does. He uses love against people. Counts on fear of people being hurt to keep everyone in line, and keep them silent about it too. Turns you into a liar keeping his secrets. He’s done it for years. This is why he couldn’t stand what he saw in the arena: people _defying_ him in the name of people they care about, rather than submitting. And I’ve submitted, believe me,. Haymitch has submitted. Others have too—Finnick Odair, Blight Arnesson, Gloss and Cashmere Donovan. Almost every victor became his little puppet.“ She felt her hand shaking, sensing the point of no return here. Haymitch’s fingers pressed against hers, steadying her.

She squeezed his hand again, pleading with him to start it. The fear and the rage both were choking her right now and she wasn’t sure she could be the one to start the purge of all of it. She didn’t want to become the bitch with the axe right not to protect herself, not when it mattered so much. “Eleven days after I was crowned victor of the 50th Hunger Games,” Haymitch picked up the tale, “my ma, my little brother, and my girlfriend were murdered here in District Twelve by President Snow. On my Victory Tour, he told me they were the price I paid for my defiance in the arena, for using the very forcefield that was supposed to trap me in there to kill my last opponent. I made the Gamemakers and the Capitol look stupid and for that I had to be punished. That wasn’t the worst, though. He had decided I was dangerous and I had to be controlled harder than that until I was no threat. More on that in a moment for y’all watching at home, but…guess what, Coriolanus? You were right. I _am_ dangerous. Because this time, I’m not afraid of you, and I’m damn well going to fight. For me, for Johanna, for District Twelve, for the family you murdered in cold blood, for the kids you’ve condemned to the arena, for all the friends that died in your fucking Quarter Quell.”

Hearing the anger and the spark of pride and resolution in his voice, she felt her lips curve into a fierce grin in answer. “I’ll fight. For me. For Haymitch. For District Seven, and Blight Arnesson and Cedrus Ollenheim. For Finnick Odair, because he was my friend. For my family—my mom and dad, my brother and sister—because Snow murdered them as well when I wasn’t his obedient little slave. For everyone who’s loved and lost and lived in fear because the Capitol says it has to be that way,” she chimed in. “It doesn’t. It shouldn’t. They keep us in fear because they know if they don’t, we’re far more powerful than they are. They depend on us. But _we don’t need them at all_.” 

“This is how the Capitol has come to work,” Haymitch picked it up from her. “They turn us from human beings into numbers. The tesserae allotted that month for a fifteen-year-old child in a family of six. Expected quotas for a district given the workforce. The odds on a tribute’s life in the arena. The price to buy them water or medicine or a weapon. And if they survive, if they become a victor…the rich and powerful in the Capitol will find out from President Snow just what price their body will sell for.”

Listening to him kick the rock away and reveal the ugly reality wasn’t easy. Truth was like fire, she thought. Sometimes painful to endure, but it burned away the rot and corruption. In that moment she was surprised to realize that what she felt for him was something fierce and proud, finally untainted by pending loss or desperation. Right then, she loved him and it almost terrified her with the depth of how much she felt, and how she hoped for that future beyond the war, uncertain as the details might be. Until then she would stand by him and fight with him because this wasn’t going to be taken away from her meekly. 

This was a new beginning for things. After the words were out and the veil of secrecy was ripped away, after they told the nation about the whoring circuit and Snow’s conveniently dead and poisoned rivals and all the murders and the torture and the lies, things could never be the same again. Maybe the inner districts would stand with them, maybe their fear would still be greater than their hope and their resolve. Maybe they’d even lose this war. But sitting there with his hand in hers, both of them defying Snow with the simple truth, she felt they’d won an important victory nonetheless.

**Author's Note:**

> I figured I'd see if I could find a way for two other people to kick off the rebellion here, and while I felt like the pressures of the arena might end up causing some of the same result in terms of "mutual suicide", hopefully the characterization and detail and fallout plays out differently enough from the Everlark nightlock berries to satisfy people. If anyone wants to write a Finnie take on that scenario, love to read that. :D


End file.
